Scientist develop synthetic polymers to combat silica scale, the unwanted coating that fouls the surfaces of various engineering systems, such as reverse osmosis desalination water-treatment membranes, heat exchanger components and plant pipelines
For kids in underserved communities, access to STEM experiences does not come as a given. Candice Halbert, YO-STEM founder and chemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is working to change this. Halbert devotes her time outside the lab to building STEM opportunities for youth in nearby communities.
YO-STEM, or Youth Outreach in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, has served the local community for seven years, and this marks year three for its competitive co-ed robotics teams. Currently, YO-STEM robotics teams, Radium and Gr8ness, rank 16 and 17 out of 145 teams in Tennessee registered for the middle-school robotics competition hosted by VEX on March 8 and 9 in Hendersonville, Tenn. The two teams are also the only Knox County teams in the state’s top 20 for this robotics competition.
Fengqui "Frank" Li is a computational developer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who uses his background as an architect to expand the landscape of design for his research into building energy modeling and beyond.
Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, to conduct computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.
Though artificial intelligence decreases human error in experimentation, human experts outperform AI when identifying causation or working with small data sets.
To capitalize on AI and researcher strengths, ORNL scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, developed a human-AI collaboration recommender system for improved experimentation performance.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s managing contractor, UT-Battelle, presented a donation of $186,000 to Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development, or SEEED, to support the nonprofit’s third green solar home as part of their Green Construction Program.
Chelsea Chen, a polymer physicist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is studying ion transport in solid electrolytes that could help electric vehicle battery charges last longer.
A modeling analysis led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory gives the first detailed look at how geothermal energy can relieve the electric power system and reduce carbon emissions if widely implemented across the United States within the next few decades.
Researchers at the Statewide California Earthquake Center, or SCEC, are unraveling the mysteries of earthquakes by using physics-based computational models running on high-performance computing systems at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team’s findings will provide a better understanding of seismic hazards in the Golden State.
In a win for chemistry, inventors at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed a closed-loop path for synthesizing an exceptionally tough carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer and later recovering all of its starting materials.
The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE, selected Jason DeGraw, a researcher with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as one of 23 members elevated to Fellow during its 2024 winter conference.
Research led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Marti Checa and Liam Collins has pioneered a groundbreaking approach, described in the journal Nature Communications, toward understanding the behavior of an electric charge at the microscopic level.
David Sholl, director of the Transformational Decarbonization Initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions in addressing large-scale chemical separation challenges, including carbon dioxide capture, using quantitative materials modeling.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have developed an algorithm to predict electric grid stability using signals from pumped storage hydropower projects.
ORNL climate modeling expertise contributed to a project that assessed global emissions of ammonia from croplands now and in a warmer future, while also identifying solutions tuned to local growing conditions.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are looking for a happy medium to enable the grid of the future, filling a gap between high and low voltages for power electronics technology that underpins the modern U.S. electric grid.
Employees of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory contributed over $828,000 to local nonprofits through the lab’s employee giving programs in 2023.
Building on $180 million in joint energy-related research, EPB and Oak Ridge National Laboratory marked 10 years of collaboration Friday with the announcement of the new Collaborative for Energy Resilience and Quantum Science, or CERQS.
Researchers, staff members and licensees from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory received top honors in the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s annual awards competition for excellence in technology transfer, excellence in technology transfer innovation, outstanding researcher and regional technology transfer.
Conducting neutron scattering experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL and Corning scientists discovered that as the number of smaller, less-stable atomic rings in a glass increases, the instability, or liquid fragility, of the glass also increases.
Researchers demonstrated that stainless steel and other metal alloys coated with hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, exhibit non-stick or low-friction qualities along with improved long-term protection against harsh corrosion and high-temperature oxidation in air.
A new computational framework created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers is accelerating their understanding of who’s in, who’s out, who’s hot and who’s not in the soil microbiome, where fungi often act as bodyguards for plants, keeping friends close and foes at bay.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Robert Wagner associate laboratory director for the Energy Science and Technology Directorate, effective Feb. 1.
Jack Orebaugh, a forensic anthropology major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, used his internship at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to find better ways to search for lost and deceased people using cameras and drones.
Scientists at ORNL have developed a technique for recovering and recycling critical materials that has garnered special recognition from a peer-reviewed materials journal and received a new phase of funding for research and development.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have identified the most energy-efficient 2024 model year vehicles available in the United States, including electric and hybrids, in the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Fuel Economy Guide.
A team of computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules.
Rajan Kumar, an engineer and the chief executive officer of Ateios Systems, is a Cohort 2022 fellow in Innovation Crossroads, or IC, a two-year DOE Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program node that helps innovators in energy and advanced manufacturing technologies take their ideas from research to the marketplace.
Most modern ocean models focus on two categories of waves: a barotropic system, which has a fast wave propagation speed, and a baroclinic system, which has a slow wave propagation speed. To help address the challenge of simulating these two modes simultaneously, a team from DOE’s Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories has developed a new solver algorithm that reduces the total run time of the Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean, or MPAS-Ocean, E3SM’s ocean circulation model, by 45%.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory became the first to 3D-print large rotating steam turbine blades for generating energy in power plants.
Magnesium oxide is a promising material for capturing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and injecting it deep underground to limit the effects of climate change. But making the method economical will require discovering the speed at which carbon dioxide is absorbed and how environmental conditions affect the chemical reactions involved.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Caterpillar Inc. have entered into a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, to investigate using methanol as an alternative fuel source for four-stroke internal combustion marine engines. The collaboration supports efforts to decarbonize the marine industry, a hard-to-electrify transportation sector.
Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are turning air into fertilizer without leaving a carbon footprint.
Four researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been named ORNL Corporate Fellows in recognition of significant career accomplishments and continued leadership in their scientific fields.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Karen White, who works in ORNL’s Neutron Science Directorate, has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award.White, who manages the section that provides the machine controls, computing infrastructure, and protection systems across all neutron science technical areas, received the award during the biennial International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, held October 7-13, 2013, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have made a significant stride toward understanding a viable process for direct air capture, or DAC, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This DAC process is in early development with the aim of achieving negative emissions, where the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the envelope of gases surrounding Earth exceeds the amount emitted.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has joined a global consortium of scientists from federal laboratories, research institutes, academia and industry to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific discovery.
Caldera Holding has licensed ORNL's membrane solvent extraction technique to separate rare earth elements in mined ore.
The company also owns the Pea Ridge iron mine in Missouri.
The mine is among the first in America shown to have relatively high amounts of dysprosium — critical for permanent magnets.
Used lithium-ion batteries from cell phones, laptops and a growing number of electric vehicles are piling up, but options for recycling them remain limited mostly to burning or chemically dissolving shredded batteries.
Benjamin Manard, an analytical chemist in the Chemical Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been selected for the 2023 Emerging Investigator Lectureship from the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.
Guided by machine learning, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a record-setting carbonaceous supercapacitor material that stores four times more energy than the best commercial material.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used their knowledge of complex ecosystem processes, energy systems, human dynamics, computational science and Earth-scale modeling to inform the nation’s latest National Climate Assessment, which draws attention to vulnerabilities and resilience opportunities in every region of the country.
Seven scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been named among the world’s most influential researchers on the 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list, produced by Clarivate, a data analytics firm that specializes in scientific and academic research.
In 1973, physicist Phil Anderson hypothesized that the quantum spin liquid, or QSL, state existed on some triangular lattices, but he lacked the tools to delve deeper. Fifty years later, a team led by researchers associated with the Quantum Science Center headquartered at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has confirmed the presence of QSL behavior in a new material with this structure, KYbSe2.
Making room for the world’s first exascale supercomputer took some supersized renovations.Frontier’s 74 cabinets cover more than 7,300 square feet in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s data center located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That’s a space roughly 1,700 square feet larger than that occupied by its high-speed predecessor Summit and more than three times the size of the average American home for a machine that runs on 30 million watts of electricity.
The team that built Frontier set out to break the exascale barrier, but the supercomputer’s record-breaking didn’t stop there.“The exascale number marks a major milestone itself, but it also marks the beginning of a new chapter in high-speed computing,” said Feiyi Wang, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer scientist who leads research into artificial intelligence and analytics.